Hull Monitor assists ship operators in data-driven decision-making for the best scheduling of maintenance activity and its effect on the ship’s energy efficiency performance

Navis, a part of Cargotec Corporation and provider of operational technologies and services that unlock greater performance and efficiency for the world’s leading organizations across the shipping supply chain, today announced Hull Monitor, a new module for the fleet performance management software Bluetracker. Hull Monitor tracks the degradation of the hull performance – resulting from self-polishing, fouling or damage – by way of speed loss calculations and visualizations, and correctively accounts for influencing factors such as weather (in accordance with ISO 19030).

The effects of the condition of the ship's hull and the propeller on the bunker consumption of a ship are significant and measurable. The new industry standard ISO 19030 – developed by shipping companies, paint and propeller manufacturers, data analysts and scientists – which recently took effect, describes the appropriate methods for measuring changes in the hull and the propeller performance. With Bluetracker Hull Monitor, ship managers and owners are able to access data from ongoing ship operations, on the basis of which they can determine the optimum point in time for a maintenance measure on the underwater hull. Ship managers, informed via an automatic notification function, can also react much more quickly to sudden, exceptionally high speed losses or changes to the hull outside of defined limits – e.g. in case of damage due to grounding, etc. – and thus save on extra expenditures for fuel.

In addition, Bluetracker Hull Monitor also offers complete transparency based on the KPI calculations, including drill-down functionality all the way to the raw data details. This consequently contributes to boosting the confidence of ship managers in the accuracy of the outer skin and propeller performance statistics.

A further key advantage of Hull Monitor is that the effects of maintenance measures on the underwater hull – such as periodic renewal of the paint during docking intervals, hull cleaning, coatings, modification of the vessel's hull, etc. – are analyzed by comparative visualization between the regressive states after the measures and the actual state. This way Hull Monitor helps to obtain a precise picture of the intended benefits from the individual measures and thus provide a data-based decision-making aid for future investments with demonstrably appropriate measures for efficiency gains for the ship in the respective area of operation.

“The IMO Ship Energy Efficiency Management SEEMP has recognized the importance of hull performance, but did not specified how to use this potential. Thanks to the new approach of Bluetracker Hull Monitor, ship owners and managers can use the collection of the hull’s lifetime data to monitor the adaptive regression and define suitable hull maintenance events exactly when maintenance is needed,” says Guenter Schmidmeir, General Manager EMEA at Navis, “They also can verify the performance effect of the taken measurements e.g. a new coating or hull cleaning. As a data specialist the software module includes plausibility checks and automatic notification if the data deviates from the defined standard to ensure a reliable data quality.”

Hull Monitor is a benefit to the operators of container ships who are bound to reaching ports on-schedule while sticking to a specific fuel consumption, and therefore place special value on the reliable monitoring of the underwater hull performance. Ship managers of other types of ships can also effectively and transparently manage existing performance guarantees (e.g. from paint manufacturers) with Hull Monitor.

Bluetracker Hull Monitor is available now. Further details can be found in the blog at www.bluetracker.de .